Album review: How to Destroy Angels, Welcome Oblivion

Mark Lepage, Special to The Gazette03.04.2013

Trent Reznor (with Nine Inch Nails at the Bell Centre in 2008) brings familiar production touches to the full-length debut of How to Destroy Angels, but they’re offset by the vocals of Mariqueen Maandig.

Even the apocalypse has a sell-by date. Even paranoia has to evolve. Realizing that the machine-press pummelling might wear out his audience or himself, or simply wanting something more supple after a few decades of machine-goth nihilism, Nine Inch Nails brainiac Trent Reznor deftly sidesteps into his own sub-genre: ambi-industrial.

He might need a human element for that. He might need a girl. And I suppose if you want an exotic female element, you could marry a woman named Mariqueen Maandig and have her sing. It’s all too easy to suggest Maandig’s central presence in How to Destroy Angels’ first full-length is the defining difference between the previous Reznor incarnation and this. Certainly, Reznor’s cinematic soundtracking indicates he was adamantly moving in a more ambient direction. Still, we’re going to go with Maandig.

Otherwise, why do it? Because there is plenty of technomechanized carry-over from NIN: the blip-beeps, skitters and grinds, the loops and chilly cyborg-steps. Bit of an ’80s riff thrown into the opening machine lurch of The Wake-Up. Cue the interestingly involuted cyber-voicings of And the Sky Began to Scream. Oh, hello robot reaper — are you here to harvest us?

Still, there is a voice to offset Reznor’s. The production inventiveness is all him and Atticus Ross — every burble and whir, the end-time oscillations, the way On the Wing’s impressively gloomy soundscape surges mesh with the measured goose-step of Too Late, All Gone. But the aptly named Ice Age is a stroke of brilliance, with Maandig’s voice working in a detached, almost blithe way off the string-plucks in place of what would have been Reznor’s stricken whisper. And in the midst of everything else, How Long? could almost be blue-eyed soul. Maandig’s verse vocals are starkly human against the squiggles, and a massive processed chorus aims straight for the charts. Good. We will remember that during the narcotized ride-out of Hallowed Ground.

Speaking of carry-over, though, of the persistence of theme: there is a problem in working an endless, bottomless seam of angst and despair — a problem beyond actually having to live there. “I can’t keep it together,” Reznor and Maandig co-whisper in the slow drone of the same name, and there is something alluring to their nod-off threnody — but how real could it be?

“The more we change / everything stays the same”; “the beginning is the end”; The Loop Closes — yes, they are giving voice to the desperate, but you can’t be in an eternal crisis. That’s not how crises work, especially not in song. Anyway, I’ve seen your wife. You’re not suicidal. The cumulative effect of Welcome Oblivion brings a welcome wrinkle to Reznor’s dystopia, and something like a break from his solipsism.

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